Open Data is an emerging term in the process of defining how data may be published and re-used without price or permission barriers. The UK is one of the pioneers of the movement on Open data, which promotes the use of open datasets, available to everybody, for the development of applications that can help to solve a problem and benefit the whole society. In the government site (http://data.gov.uk/) there are, at the moment, 24,000 datasets from different area such as environment, health, transport, etc.

Even though there are many datasets available to use, it is essential to remember that the datasets must be analyzed and cleaned first before using it, it can alter the result of a product and may lead to problems with the users. One free tool available in the market to perform the task of cleaning is “Google refine” (https://code.google.com/p/google-refine/) which offers features such as trimming or removal of blank spaces, transform data to different types (numeric, text, date), clusters to help to visualize certain parts of the data, etc.

In particular for the project, open data can be used to improve the functionality of the application. Even though the application will work with affiliate establishments, the use of open data sets can be used to offer a better service to the user. For example, in the government site (mentioned above) there is a data set about food hygiene according to the food standards agency for different regions in the whole UK, the data set includes the city of Southampton and this data set can be helpful to notify the user about the hygiene of the restaurants they would like to visit. The data set can be found at: http://data.gov.uk/dataset/uk-food-hygiene-rating-data-south-east-food-standards-agency. The data is downloaded in a XML format and includes information such as: name, type of business, address, scores and geocode. As it was mentioned previously, the first important thing are the scores and according to the Food Standards Agency a score of 5 means the establishment has very good hygiene standards, while a 0 means urgent improvement (http://www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/hygiene-rating-schemes/rating-schemes-faqs-en/fhrs) .

Besides the name and address, another important information is the geocode which are the coordinates of the restaurant, this information can be used to draw the location in a map. For example, “Open Street Map” (http://www.openstreetmap.org/), which is an open/free map to use created by people, can be used in the project to display the results in a map when a user is searching for a venue.  Open Street Map already displays the location of different establishments, which it can be helpful to analyze new local business with the intention to create new business opportunities to work with our app. However, in order to use Open Street Map for our project, it is required to use a library, among the different libraries, one option is “Leaflet” which is an open source JavaScript library that helps to create mobile friendly interactive maps (http://leafletjs.com/).

For the reasons mentioned above, using open data that publish information that can be helpful to our project giving the possibility to introduce new features in our application or to improve the experience of the user when using it. In this particular case, the data set not only provides the scores of the restaurants but also their name, address and geocode, making easier the development with the use of libraries such as “Leaflet” to create interactive map. The use of Open Data open helps to the creation of new types of businesses or applications, and it also benefits the society with new and/or better services.